cross, crisscross, and recross

yesterday i read this feature in the New York Times—via Austin Kleon’s newletter—that asked 75 artists 7 questions about creating (or not creating) work during the pandemic.

it got me thinking about what i’ve created (or not created) over the past trash-fire-of-a-year. and i find it interesting that i’ve gravitated towards smaller projects in genres or forms that i don’t typically work in, but that i’ve flirted with before.

short stories. a one-act musical screenplay to be performed live via Zoom. i even wrote a murder mystery dinner party for my family at the start of lockdown, which is something i’ve been wanting to do since i become obsessed with them as a kid.

it makes me think of a line from my favorite novel, Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell:

“But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”

surviving, not thriving

i have a couple weeks blogging (more-or-less) daily under my belt and i’m surprised i haven’t yet referenced who i consider my godfather of blogging (blogfather?), Austin Kleon. i’ve been subscribed to his newsletter and following his work for years, but it was a recent reread of his book trilogy—Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going—that finally sparked this effort.

a recent blog post of his led me to to this article in The Atlantic by Ellen Cushing reflecting on how late-stage pandemic is affecting our brains.

and as someone who watches Sims 4 speed-builds on youtube as a form of comfort while sheltering-in-place, i loved (read: was devastated by) this from Cushing:

Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a finite suite of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set of strings being pulled from far offscreen. Everything is two-dimensional, fake, uncanny. My world is as big as my apartment, which is not very big at all.

“We’re trapped in our dollhouses,” said Kowert, the psychologist from Ottawa, who studies video games. “It’s just about surviving, not thriving. No one is working at their highest capacity.” She has played The Sims on and off for years, but she always gives up after a while—it’s too repetitive.

Earlier versions of The Sims had an autonomous memory function, according to Marina DelGreco, a staff writer for Game Rant. But in The Sims 3, the system was buggy; it bloated file sizes and caused players’ saved progress to delete. So The Sims 4, released in 2014, does not automatically create memories. PC users can manually enter them, and Sims can temporarily feel feelings: happy, tense, flirty. But for the most part, a Sim is a hollow vessel, more like a machine than a living thing.

woof.

a period in the right place

just got my copy of George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

PMI

on Wednesdays, we celebrate platonic male intimacy on The Great British Baking Show.

in series seven—which i’m currently rewatching on Netflix, and which might be my favorite—bakers David and Henry share a post-showstopper-challenge cuddle. it gets approximately 0.5 seconds of screen time, but i. am. thirsty.

i think we need more of an allowance for this in our society.

and while we’re here, we might as well simp over my favorite moment from the fourth season of Legend of Korra:

David Mitchell and letters from your characters

yesterday, i said i was plotting my novel using a slightly altered Snowflake Method. i’ve replaced the character bibles/profiles/summaries with a trick i learned from one of my all-time favorite authors, David Mitchell.

“This might be a trade secret,” Mitchell jests, “but it works for me, and you can have it.”

he suggests writing letters to yourself in the voice of your characters about the things they care about, like money, work, politics, religion, sex, and the concerns/other people/world of the story.

i find this advice so helpful and reassuring and accessible, i have it Scotch-taped above my makeshift writing desk, right next to the Harmon story circle. and somewhere along the line, i’ve added the topic of ‘Family,” which rounds it out to a nice, uneven nine.

“When you get stuck, get systematic,” Mitchell says. “You’re usually stuck because you don’t know your characters well enough.”

listen to his full advice below—

creating complex characters

i’m currently plotting a novel using a (slightly altered) version of the Snowflake Method. so far, it’s been relatively hardship-free.

i’m about to switch from fleshing out the plot to fleshing out characters, however, so i returned to this video—another great one from Shaelin Bishop—on creating complex characters.

i’m particularly drawn to this concept of “the dark room,” which is basically a key aspect of the character that is never made explicit in the story, but a reader could infer what it is based on other elements present. now my homework is to find the Alice Munro essay where the term originated…

watch the whole video below!

i'll have what she's having

turns out Rodgers and Hammerstein puns are too rich for my parents’ cats’ sensitive stomachs.

i’ve been in a weeks-long experiment to find out which proteins have been making their litter box resemble a Jackson Pollack painting. this has involved a lot of monitoring mealtime, staring at soft poops, and recording my findings in a chaotic handwritten spreadsheet.

(my parents’ vet suggested turkey for cats with digestive issues. so far, so good.)

i enjoy sitting with them in the laundry room as they eat or don’t eat. i find it meditative making sure the Food-Motivated Cat doesn’t consume what belongs to the Anxiety-Riddled Cat. (this is not a metaphor.)

but perhaps most charming is when they lose interest in their own food, swap plates, and, suddenly, their appetites return with gusto. but it’s the same food. (this is a metaphor.)

a southern day

between starting my day off reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt and listening to an episode of the New Yorker: Fiction podcast featuring Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You My Love,” i am having a deeply southern day.

even as i write this, my cat sleeps on the stool next to me. late afternoon sun slants through the shutters and i hear the drone of a neighbor’s lawnmower. the ceiling fan turns lazily overhead.

cancelled plans

i was scheduled to do something today, but then it was cancelled.

i wish i could bottle that feeling.

Yankee should make a candle that smells like cancelled plans.

the impetus

while plotting yesterday, i took a definitely-not-procrastinatory detour into writing craft videos on youtube and stumbled upon this overview of 4-act story structure by Adam Skelter.

i love his rebranding of the ‘inciting incident,’ which is an amorphous and contested term for the plot beat that sets the story in motion. basically, without the inciting incident, a story won’t happen.

Skelter says, “the term’s always bothered me because, technically, every single sequence has an inciting incident, has an incident that’s inciting the next behavior.”

Blake Snyder, who wrote the Save the Cat! book series which codified his popular 15-beat screenplay structure, calls this moment the ‘catalyst.’ but Skelter (pedantically, he admits) defines a catalyst as when there’s “a chemical reaction that’s already going to happen and a catalyst speeds it up… the catalyst is going to take something inevitable and enhance it.”

that’s why he calls this beat the ‘impetus’ instead.

“Impetus is a force that moves, that motivates movement,” he says, “which is a very specific thing that happens once in a screenplay.”

i’m not sure how the science or linguistics checks out on all of this, but the logic makes sense to me.

and i agree with his larger point: “I think whatever metaphor helps people make sense of the story and take care of the essential elements, that’s fine.”

watch more of Adam’s videos here on his youtube channel The Art of Story.